In full bloom

Friday

Jan 25, 2008 at 6:00 AMJan 25, 2008 at 7:59 AM

By Nancy Sheehan TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF

There will be lilies, chrysanthemums, freesias, orchids, narcissus and roses of every color. And the blossoms will be fresh and fragrant whether you come by on the first or the last day of Flora in Winter, a four-day springlike-fling that opened last night and runs through Sunday.

The event-enduring beauty of the blooms doesn’t just happen. It takes a lot of hard work to pull off the wilt-defeating feat. At Flora — the annual celebration in which floral arrangements imitate art — the task falls to a watering-can-wielding corps from the Worcester Garden Club who come in early each morning of the four-day event to care for the flowers. Beginning at 7 a.m. the group, including Flora co-chairs Robin Whitney and Kim Cutler, push a cart from arrangement to arrangement. Over a period of about three hours, they hydrate the thirsty, revive the wilted, tweak the tattered. They remove a brown leaf here, a crushed sprig there, replacing them with identical plant material specially cached away by each arranger just in case a little refreshment is needed.

“It’s challenging working on someone else’s arrangement,” Cutler said. “You have to take out old flowers, you have to refresh their flowers and you have to water without ruining the whole thing.”

Or ruining a museum gallery or — gasp — a painting.

“There are very strict rules,” she said. Sanctions include such normally innocuous things as spray bottles for water, lest an errant spritz catch the corner of a priceless artwork. “We all come with our cloths and our bottles of water that are closed and we pour the water into a watering can and very gently water. It’s fun but it needs somebody who has a little experience. At the beginning I overwatered everything and had puddles.”

This year marks the sixth time Worcester Art Museum and Tower Hill Botanic Garden have collaborated to host Flora in Winter, in which skilled artisans come up with highly evocative interpretations of artwork at the museum. In the case of Tower Hill, arrangers give their creative takes on a theme, which this year is “Passport to China.” The event includes demonstrations, an afternoon tea, guided tours and workshops. There also is a recorded audio tour and other features aimed at making the event accessible to the visually impaired.

Like bees to a flower, Flora draws new audiences to the museum, Nancy Jeppson, a museum staffer and exhibition coordinator for the event, said.

“It’s great to come in here. It smells wonderful. It’s a feast for the eyes, so we get people in who would not normally come to a museum,” she said. Last year, Flora drew 6,500 people to the museum over the four days. The only event that can rival it in numbers is First Night, when anywhere from 3,000 to 6,000 people stop by for the evening, she said.

A surprising number of those visitors come from outside the area. “I’m getting a lot of calls from the South Shore, people from Boston,” Jeppson said. “They’re reserving spaces for our different special events.”

Bonnie Hariton is coming all the way from the San Francisco Bay area.

“I love the Worcester Art Museum,” said Hariton, whose son is a graduate of Worcester Polytechnic Institute. “I came to Worcester to visit him during his freshman year and I started coming to the museum then and I fell in love with it.” She is especially fond of the Contemporary Gallery, with its engagingly varied exhibitions. “I never know what I am going to find in that room and it never fails to surprise me,” she said. This is the first time she has made it cross country to Flora. Ironically her son, who now lives in Natick, will be on the West Coast on business but her enthusiasm for the event is undimmed and she and her husband plan to attend all four days. “I’m so excited,” she said earlier this week. “I’ve seen some of the pictures and how the floral arrangements play off the colors in painting and I’m really looking forward to seeing it.”

As are a lot of other people, even those, like Ken Bositis, who have seen it before. This is Bositis’ fifth year participating as an arranger. “It’s just developed and it gets better and better every year,” Bositis, owner of Bloomer’s, a florist at 299 Pleasant St., Worcester, said Wednesday, a day before the event’s gala kickoff. “More people are getting involved and it’s exciting. From tomorrow night’s cocktail party through Sunday afternoon the museum just comes alive and it’s great.”

Arrangers are somewhat loosely divided into two groups, those who are representing professional florists and another made up of from garden clubs or otherwise working non-commercially. The professionals, of which there are 18 this year, do arrangements in the museum’s public areas — the lobbies, hallways and so forth while the non-commercial arrangers, 22 of them this time, set up shop in the galleries.

Bositis is doing both. As a pro, he interpreted what has become the museum mascot of sorts, the 1907 portrait of Sally Ruggles, a giant copy of which graces the museum exterior at the Lancaster Street entrance. Bositis explained how he captured the delicate young woman’s essence in flowers: “I just thought the coloration was very important. She’s very innocent and sweet so I used a lot of small flowers making it very airy — whites, off whites, creams just complimented her complexion.”

Flora is held either the last week of January or the first week of February each year. That it comes earlier this time around is a help to arrangers, especially the professionals who soon will be insanely busy with Valentine’s orders. All arrangers benefit from lower flower prices the further away from Valentine’s day the event is held.

“Everyone supplies their arrangements at no cost to the museum so cost is a factor for them,” Jeppson said. “I have been told that with higher fuel costs this year just the transporting of the flowers and the heating (of greenhouses) that flowers are very expensive this year, so to move it back one week away from Valentine’s Day is a benefit this year particularly.”

The timing also offers a much-needed lift in the wintry lull between New Year’s and Valentine’s Day.

“It’s just a perfect time of year to do expressions with flowers,” Bositis said. “It’s so bad outside. There’s no green out there at all and to come into the museum and see all the varieties of flowers and all the different textures and colors and arrangements, it’s a great thing.”

Flora in Winter at the art museum continues from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. today and Sunday and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. tomorrow.

There are many special events associated with Flora. Two of co-chair Robin Whitney’s picks are: